October 25, 2019 1 min to read

Gmail Ninja with aliases

Get the most out of Gmail

Gmail aliases

Did you know you have practically infinite number of email addresses all with a single gmail address? Just add a + to your address and off you go. Note this does not work for all email providers.

Let’s see it in practice:

• imawesome+alias@gmail.com - will go to imawesome@gmail.com
• imawesome+alias2@gmail.com - will go to imawesome@gmail.com

<YOUR_EMAIL>+<ANY_ALIAS>@gmail.com

What do I do with aliases

Now that you know how, let’s talk about two use cases for them.

• Use them to see who is selling your email address by signing up to different services with different aliases
• Use them for advanced filtering, rules and searching

Seeing who’s selling your email address

Ever get an email from a random service or provider that you never signed up for? This is most likely due to a service selling your email to another site or mailing list. So go ahead and next time your thinking about signing up to a site try it. Example: Signing up to facebook go ahead and do imawesome+facebook@gmail.com. Now if you get emails to this address from any other place, you know who they sold your data too.

Filters, Rules and Searching

You may not want to create an alias for everything so think about grouping certain ones if you don’t want to get super granular. That way you can then create filters/rules on gmail and put them automatically in gmail folders. See Gmail Rules/Filtering.

Some categories I have:

• imawesome+retail@gmail.com (Stores like Target, BestBuy, etc)
• imawesome+social@gmail.com (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
• imawesome+finance@gmail.com (Banks, Investments)

Now you can also quickly search for different categories and things by just searching for your alias.

Thanks

As always I’m always looking to improve this so if I missed something major let me know and I’ll add it. Email me at info@adigitaldad.com to get in touch.

Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash